Some 6,600 Los Angeles area households had no electricity Wednesday morning, according to the L.A. Department of Water and Power, which urged its customers to conserve energy to alleviate the strain on the grid during a record-breaking heat wave.
As of 5:30 a.m., the outages mostly affected residents in Koreatown, Studio City, Van Nuys and Valley Village, LADWP said. Social media users also reported an ongoing outage in the West Hills area.
About 12,000 of LADWP’s 1.5 million customers lost their service Tuesday night, said a utility spokesperson, citing “strained equipment in the field, transformers and distributing stations that become overheated.”
“Our crews made excellent progress overnight restoring outages caused by extreme heat and electricity demand,” LADWP said.
The utility began reporting localized outages across the city Friday just as one of the state’s worst heat waves in years started.
Energy shortages led to rolling blackouts elsewhere in the state. The California Independent System Operator has issued a statewide Flex Alert every day since Friday.
On Tuesday, National Weather Service Los Angeles reported new heat records for the day in Burbank (109 degrees), Camarillo (95 degrees), Long Beach (100 degrees), Oxnard (90 degrees), Paso Robles (111 degrees), Woodland Hills (112 degrees) and UCLA (97 degrees).
Forecasters expect the heat to persist through at least Thursday.
The heat wave continues as firefighters battle dozens of wildfires across California, including three major blazes in L.A. County.
